An interview by Thomas Fleming with Dr.
Barry Fell of Harvard University appeared in The
Reader’s Digest in 1977.In this article Fleming stated that although most Americans believe
that their history began with Christopher Columbus, historians have lately
discovered hard evidence that Leif Erickson and his fellow Norsemen were
exploring Canada and the northern tier of the United States as earl as 1000
A.D.However, before that date the
history of the New World above the Rio Grande had been a virtual vacuum,
inhibited by scattered Indian legends.

Now the genius of
Dr Fell has caused a mind-boggling change in attitude on the subject of
American colonization.In his
published book, America B.C., New
Zealand-born Barry Fell, a marine biologist at Harvard, offered astonishing
evidence that there were men and women from Europe, not merely exploring but
living in North America as early as 800 B.C.This was followed by additional books in 1982, 1983, 1985 and 1989
where the dates of such colonization were pushed back to as early as 1700
B.C. (See Bronze)These early settlers worked as miners, tanners and trappers, and
shipped their products back to Europe.In temples in the rugged hills of New Hampshire and Vermont (Sce Photos-1 & Photos-2)
and in river valleys in Iowa and Oklahoma they sang hymns and performed
sacred rituals to honor their gods.When their kings or chiefs died, they buried them beneath huge mounds
of earth in which they left steles—written testimony of their grief carved on
stone.

Some of these
steles had been discovered as early as the 19th Century, and
people had puzzled over strange incscriptions carved on cliffs from the Maine
coast to the Rio Grande and west to Nevada and California, or on stones that
lay in obscure museums.But
archeologists could not read the ancient writings and dismissed these
mysteries as forgeries or accidents of nature.Dr. Fell’s exepertise in this field known as epigraphy, which
requires many of the gifts intelligent persons bring to code-cracking, is the
tool which has enabled him to add a thousand years or more to America’s
past.Fell first became interested in
ancient languages while a student at the University of Edinburgh.He learned Gaelic, and began to
investigate Celtic tombs and ruins in Scotland.Then, in a study of the marine biology of Polynesia, he found
hundreds of unreadable inscriptions engraved on rocks and painted on cavern
walls.

Intrigued, Fell
came to Harvard in 1964 and spent the next eight years exploring the Widener
Library’s unique collection of texts on obscure languages and writing
systems.In the course of this effort
he acquired a working knowledge of several ancient alphabets, including the
hieroglyphics of the Egyptians = Punic); the script of the Carthaginians and
Ogam, an almost forgotten script used by the pre-Christian Norse (often
erroneously referred to as Celts—See Celts).

Fell finally
proved to his satisfaction that the Polynesian inscriptions were written in
the native language, Maori.But its vocabulary was a mixture of Greek
and Egyptian that was once spoken in Libya after Alexander the Great conquered
Egypt.The alphabet was derived from
Carthage.

The most remarkable
of these Libyan texts was found in a huge cave in New Guinea.There a navigator named Mauileft drawings of ancient but sophisticated
astronomical and navigational instruments, as well as a depiction of a solar
eclipse that enabled Fell, with the help of Harvard astronomers, to identify
the year of the drawings as 232 B.C.

If these were
Libyans visiting Polynesia at that time, Fell reasoned perhaps they sailed on
to South America.He soon accumulated
evidence for such landfalls and began lecturing on it at Harvard.His talks attracted the attention of a
group of investigators led by James P. Wittall II, an archeologist, who had
noted the similarity between numerous crude stone buildings in New England
which farmers often called root cellars, and similar ruins in Spain and
Portugal.The European buildings had
been identified as creations of Celts who ruled that part of Europe during
the Bronze Age, the period of prehistory, which dates roughly from 3500 B.C.

Whittall asked Fell
to take a look at the Bourne stone, which had been discovered near Bourne,
Massachusetts around 1680. (Scan Photos)No one had ever been able to make any
sense of the writing on it.Now, Dr.
Fell was able to read it.The letters
were a variation of the Punic alphabet, found in ancient Spain, for which
Fell had coined the word “Iberic.”It
recorded the annexation of a large portion of present-day Massachusetts by
Hanno, a prince of Carthage.Fell
joined in a search for additional inscriptions at one of their favorite
sites, Mystery Hill in North Salem, N.H.. (Scan Photos)This site consists of a series of
slabstone buildings, variously attributed to Norsemen, wandering Irish monks,
and a vanished tribe of Indians.Studying the inscribed triangular stones, which had previously been
found at the site, Fell found a dedication to the Phoenician god Baal, written in Iberic.Then promptly other people began to See
hitherto unnoticed inscriptions in the area.The owner of Mystery Hill, Bob Stone found another table in an adjacent
drystone wall.When Fell brushed away
the adhering soil, he was able to read a line of Ogam script that read
“Dedicated to Bel.”

Students of ancient
mythology had long suspected that the Celtic sun god Bel and the
Carthaginian-Phoenician god Ball were identical.Here, for the first time, there was evidence not only of this
fact, but of a Celtic-Carthaginian partnership in exploration and settlement
on a scale previously never even imagined.

In the following
days Other Ogam inscriptions were located at another site in central Vermont
(Scan Photos).Fell noted that it became clear that ancient Celts had build
these stone chambers as religious shrines, and the Carthaginian mariners were
visitors who were permitted to worship at them and make dedications in their
own language to their own gods.

Then Whittall
showed Fell a photograph of an inscription engraved on a cliff above Mount
Hope Bay, in Bristol, Rhode Island, which was discovered and recorded in
1780.Because of vandalization, it
was necessary to work from the photograph.Fell soon translated a single line, which was written in Punic:“Voyagers
from Tarshish this stone proclaims.”

Tarshish was a
Biblical city on the southern coast of Spain, and its citizens were among the
boldest sailors of antiquity, famous for the size of their ships.In 533 B.C., the Carthaginians and their
trade taken over by these ambitious, daring sailors destroyed Tarshish.Here was evidence of how the partnership
between Celts and the Carthaginians began.

On Monhegan Island,
12 miles off the coast of Maine, another inscription was brought to Dr.
Fell’s attention.It was written in
Celtic Ogam and read, “Cargo platforms for
ships from Phoenicia.” [(Also scan Photos)]From these and other inscriptions, as well as an intensive study of
historical data on the seafaring ability of the men of Tarshish and Carthage,
Fell concluded that there was a highly developed trade route between America
and the Mediterranean for at least 400 years before the birth of Christ.The principal products from North America
were probably copper, furs and hides.Fell noted that there was evidence of very early mining in the copper
fields of Minnesota as well as of an extensive fur trade.The Carthaginians used to proclaim that
they obtained their furs from Gaul.But when the Romans finally invaded Gaul, they found very little
evidence of a fur trade.Thus, Gaul
might have been a code word for America.A prevailing obstacle to verifying Bronze Age voyages from Europe to
America is the absenceofbronzetools among the American
artifacts. (Please See Bronze Age Tools).

Data from America
now began to multiply.Most important
was Fell’s translation of the Davenport stele, which some people compare to
the translation of the Rosetta stone—the 19th-Century breakthrough
that enabled a reading of hieroglyphics and to grasp the awesome sweep of
Egyptian history.On this
inscription, which was found in a burial mound near Davenport, Iowa in 1874,
Dr. Fell was able to read three kinds of writing.At the top were Egyptian hieroglyphics.Below them was the Iberic form of Punic
writing found in Spain.The third
line was in Libyan script.This mean
that there were Egyptians, Libyans and Celtic Iberians living together in a
colony in Iowa in 900 B.C.It also
means that we have to revise a lot of our ideas about American history in
general and the culture of the Amerindians in particular.

Paying closer
attention to native Amerindian languages, Barry Fell next reasoned that if
these pre-Christian visitors actually colonized parts of America, they mush
have left behind them a deep impression on the language and beliefs of the
people they encountered.He soon
found abundant evidence to support this conclusion.

One of Fell’s
colleagues brought him a book from Harvard’s Widener Library that was written
by a missionary priest and published din 1866.It contained a document titled “The Lord’s Prayer in Micmac Hieroglyphics.”Fell saw that at least half of these
hieroglyphics were Egyptian.He was
able to prove from the written testimony of other priests that the Micmacs
were using this writing when the first missionaries arrived.In fact, all the Northern Algonquians, the
family of tribes to which the Micmacs belonged, apparently used it, having
acquired this language from Libyan mariners and preserved it for over 1000
years.

As Fell began to
study the Algonquian language, he found hundreds of Egyptian words in the
dialects of the Northeastern Algonquians.The verb na,
to See, is the same in both
languages.So is nauw, which means to be weak, and neechnw, which
means child.Celtic is also plentiful.The names of many New England rivers, one
thought to be Amerindian, turn out to be Celtic.Merrimack,
for instance, means “deep fishing”
in Algonquian.It is too close for
coincidence to the Gaelic Mor-riomach, meaning “of great depth.”

Barry Fell’s
suggestion that Egypt might have had intense contact with North America is
strongly supported by the huge boats, which were discovered in 1950 adjacent
to Khufu’s great pyramid.They were
buried between 2589 and 2566 B.C..One has been restored and it shows considerable wear as if it had gone
on long journeys.Its length is 43.63
meters, width 5.66 meters (See Egyptian Boat).This ship was perfectly capable of
crossing the Atlantic.The other
boats wree left intact, awaiting additional funding to rebuild them as
well.An excellent article about
these boats may be found in the April/May 2004 issue of Ancient Egypt Magazine.

Edo Nyland’s decipherment of
the Horsecreek Petroglyph (See Horsecreek) in a West
Virginia canyon using Basque showed it to be an eye witness account of a
bison hunt, the animals being driven over a cliff.Nyland noted that the very large Ogam inscription in that
canyon is written in a type of Ogam different from Irish, one that has never
been used in Ireland.He suspected it
to be Libyan Ogam (personal communication). The Libyans and Northern
Egyptians at that time were blond and blue eyed..Edo Nyland suspects that the Four Khalifs who conquered Egypt
and Libya around 500 AD drove the blond people from their homeland.They made it clear that they would not
tolerate any Nonbeliever religions.The blond people had excellent boats and they all sailed first to
Ireland, from where the more adventurous ones went to North America, where
they eventually joined the native life style.The 17th Century English settlers in the United
States wrote home telling about native tribes with blond hair (Robert L.
Pyle, All That Remains, pp
66)They were subsequently absorbed
in the new population